


Thrice to Thine and Thrice to Mine

by englishable



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-21
Updated: 2019-07-21
Packaged: 2020-07-10 00:14:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19896715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: An alternate take on the Norn Cave scene in Age of Ultron; Sif is accustomed to accompanying Thor on these hazardous misadventures, but this really is a new kind of dangerous. That's precisely why he brings her along.





	Thrice to Thine and Thrice to Mine

**Author's Note:**

> I asked for prompts over on tumblr and @chrishemsworth came through beautifully. The idea was based around a deleted scene from Age of Ultron (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM08towNZFQ), which extends the moment where Thor and Erik go to the Cave of the Norns for answers (side note, but the longer scene gives a lot of important context and I’d like to have A Friendly Talk with the test audience who suggested cutting it). 
> 
> The idea was to replace Erik with Sif, which makes sense considering the fact that having a fellow Asgardian along might prove helpful when tangling with cosmic forces that possess and then risk consuming you whenever you commune with them.

…

The cave sends a single drip of cold water down onto the parting in Sif’s hair and the cavern makes their footsteps resound through the darkness from which they have come. Thor ducks his head beneath a low outcropping, looking back over his shoulder at her, and he straightens when they emerge at the edge of a deep, still pool.

Sif leans over. Her face casts no reflection in the black water.

“Are you sure about this?”

Thor draws a filigreed flask from his coat pocket and pulls its cork. “As sure as I ever am about anything.” 

“You’ll understand me if I say that doesn’t precisely inspire my full confidence.”

“I can’t imagine why it shouldn’t.” He smiles at her, though the expression does not quite reach his eyes. The knot in his throat bobs as he downs the flask’s contents in one long draught. “I have a nearly impeccable record of not getting myself killed.”

“Thanks in no small part to me, if I’m remembering correctly.”

“Why do you think I asked you along on this excursion?”

“Well, it certainly wasn’t for a sampling of that ale.”

He stoppers the flask and sucks his teeth at the taste. “I’ll get you something better when this is over.”

Sif watches him shrug off his coat. She wears a gray traveling cloak and a short sword but has left her shield behind; four hours ago she had awakened to a thumping at her window and found Thor standing there on its casement, furtive and desperate in his purpose, and for one demented instant Sif had wondered if he was drunk. The explanation he has supplied her with in coming here – Stark, a suit of armor around the world, a witch and a vision of Asgard in flames – would no doubt make more sense if he had been: but Sif has followed him nonetheless, to a place from the old cautionary tales of her childhood, so she may rightly be called the really demented one between the two of them.

Tall shafts of light touch down from the upper caverns and are rimpled by the moving, watching water that is said to swallow men’s souls. It casts bright glyphs against the cave walls and across Thor’s face while he rolls out of his shirt; the muscles of his back bunch together like coiled ropes and if it were not for the terror that is quickening her blood Sif would probably glance away. She feels her heart tighten, however, and does not.

“The thing I fear – ” she starts.

“—Contains the thing I need,” Thor finishes. His smile is different this time. “Did General Tyr teach you that one?”

“Yes,” she says. “But I heard it first from your father.”

“He must’ve told me that a hundred times when I was a boy.” Thor takes the shoes from his feet and walks silently forward across the stones. “We’ll see how well I listened.”

He reaches the edge of the pool, which looks more like a well upon further consideration, and slips into the water. It accepts him with hardly a ripple, the way it might receive a cast stone or a gold coin.

Sif waits.

When she was a girl, half-grown and flat-edged as a dagger, her grandmother had kept three little statues wrapped together in a scarlet burial shroud. Sif had looked at these statues once, and only once, on the evening before she was to meet with her first battle.

The three figures were cloaked women all carved from the clean-split wood of an ash tree and had no faces, or at least no faces Sif could see, because their artist had fashioned each one with its head bowed low as though in humility or else its mocking imitation. Her grandmother had passed the statues to Sif and in doing so had named them.

This first one is called Skuld, she said, who knows what has been and what has come before; the second one is Verðandi, she said, who knows all that is or is becoming in the present moment which will be gone at the very same time as it arrives; and this one here, she said, is Urðdr, the third and last and most powerful, the one whom the mortals call Wyrd and who reminds us of what must someday come to pass.

Sif had studied the three mute, carved women in her hands, which felt numb whenever she considered what they would be required to do come the morning.

But why ‘must,’ Sif had asked, looking up from the hidden faces of the Norns. Don’t I get to choose?

Yes, her grandmother had answered. If you do it right, you can choose how you die. 

And that’s it?

That is everything. 

Sif grips her elbows while she counts methodically backwards from ten. The rings in the dark water disperse where Thor has vanished beneath its surface and she recites the names to herself again: Skuld, Verðandi, Urðdr who is called Wyrd, as in the mortal word that once meant _‘fate.’_ As a child Thor had always demonstrated a kind of genial, assured custodianship regarding his future title as king, a valued possession he had come to by rightful inheritance but into which he had no settled plans for putting anything of himself that he could not afford to lose.

Yet it is his future, all the same, and when Sif views him at just the right angle nowadays – ever since his return from banishment, really – she can imagine it seated heavy as an iron mantle across his shoulders, or else imagine it as a spear affixing him to the branches of Yggdrasil like in those mortal stories about his father.

There is a stirring beneath the water.

Thor rises again from the pool with silver streaming off his hair. His laugh is a dry deriding sound and the three voices slither between his teeth.

“ _Fools_ ,” they say, in greeting.

“No doubt,” Sif answers, “so it’s fitting that I’ve come to ask you a fool’s question.”

The women all laugh again and grin at her through Thor’s face; the cruelty of its expression almost changes him into a stranger. _“Ask, then.”_

“We seem to have made ourselves an enemy.” She kneels on the wet stone and splays her hands flat. “Tell me how to defeat him.”

_“Sacrifice.”_

“Oh, don’t waste my time,” she says. “Just because you’ve got an infinite supply of it doesn’t mean the rest of us enjoy the same privilege. No victory worth the name is ever gotten without a sacrifice – whose?”

_“Yours.”_ A snap of lightning illuminates the cave and Thor’s body gives a painful twist. The tendons rise in his neck. _“His. All of you. The stones will demand it and you will give it over, when the end comes.”_

The pulse kicks against Sif’s ribs as she watches Thor’s body jerk again. A second blast of lightning burns its channel through the air and leaves a smell like an extinguished candle. The stones, she thinks, the stones, and another childhood recollection comes back to her, of standing in the vaults below Asgard alongside Thor and studying the Tesseract’s spectral blue light.

“You’re speaking of infinity stones,” she says. “Which of the six is it that we need?”

_“And you, girl,”_ the voices answer, _“are more a fool than most.”_

“I know that, too. Which stone?”

_“The mind stone._ ” The veins stand out in Thor’s arms when he clenches his hands. He strains forward as though against a short chain. _“The mind which is the maker of all the truest monsters.”_

“How do we get it?” Sif stands. “Unless this Ultron already has it. If he – ”

_“Ask the man this one here calls his friend.”_ There is another laugh and the next writhe is so violent Sif fears something inside Thor will rip in half. He points at her. _“You are being led you to your death, shield-maiden.”_

“Is that meant to frighten me?” She gathers her hands into fists against the rocks and tries to stare through Thor’s clouded eyes to whatever is behind them. “I’ve heard enough, now. Stop this.”

The three voices of past and present and future laugh the most at this, and they laugh the longest. _“It is not your place to command us.”_

“My place is to say whatever I please. Let him go.”

_“You should’ve asked for that before we began, girl. You asked for victory and you shall have it. This is merely the payment we extract - it is rare thing when we are given the chance to possess a prince of Asgard.”_

Thor opens his mouth and there is a young boy’s cry beneath the three dread ancient voices. Sif has come to the very edge of the churning pool and gray shale skims off its banked sides where her heels touch it.

“Thor,” she calls. “Thor.”

_“Leave us,”_ Thor says. The voice is somehow both more and less like his own. _“We do not know you.”_

The fear goes through Sif in a sharp, cold sweep. She recalls Thor again – she has recalled it often – as he threw down her shield and walked out alone to face the Destroyer. She recalls running through a pair of opened doors to find father and son both kneeling over Frigga’s body.

“His life is not yours to keep. He’s paid enough already.”

_“And what are you, to know such a thing?”_

Sif considers her answer, though only for the few seconds it requires to unsheathe her sword and discard it in a clatter. She loosens her cloak, here in this center of the fragile mortal world Thor has come to love at the price of his own life.

“I’m his friend.” She lets the cloak drop. “And I’m his past. That means I’ve got at least a one-third part of the same claim on him as you do.”

_“That means nothing.”_ The voices grow louder. Thor’s face has taken on a strange cast and the bones of it appear to be assuming new, harder shapes. _“It is the future he fears and the future that keeps him in its power.”_

“Well, if that’s all you want, you can have mine instead. I’d think one future would be worth about as much as any other, by your accounts.”

_“Come and give it to us, then.”_

Sif slides into the water.

Her bearings are lost in the plunging darkness and it is so cold she feels it within the roots of her hair: then another thread of white lightning pulses through the cave and in two more turns Sif has found the surface again.

She fumbles for Thor’s hands and grasps them.

“Here,” she tells him. “Go on and take it.”

The next blast of lightning is so great it seems to rive her brain down the center like an oak and Sif almost believes she has gone blind, but when she opens her eyes she sees Thor sag half-senseless under the water. She hauls him back up and it takes all her strength – along with what remains of his – to drag him from the pool by his arms. They lie there streaming wet on the rocks until Thor rolls over to spit water. The cave is silent except for the echo of their rasping breath.

“So.” He chokes and coughs again. A strand of hair wicks to his cheek. “Another infinity stone.”

“Yes.” Sif puts her hands over her face. Her heart is beating so hard her ears throb. “Just once, I really would like you to devise a plan that doesn’t involve the possibility of your death.”

“Why not? It always works out.”

She lowers her hands. Thor is shaking himself dry, wringing his hair and getting somewhat unsteadily from his knees to his feet, and Sif realizes – or she remembers, in keeping with those same old stories – that he will not remember the particulars of what has taken place in the pool, except whatever further visions the Norns have placed inside his head. 

It settles her back into her right senses, but she still waits for her pulse to slow before sitting up. She reaches over to slap her sword back in its scabbard. 

“I may surprise you yet. Next time, you can play the sensible one and I’ll play the part of the one who risks dying in a needless fit of theatrics.”

Thor reaches down to help her stand. Their hands join like two threads twisting together.

“Don’t be ridiculous.” He holds on briefly before letting go. “As if I could ever let that happen.”

…


End file.
